Ironically, what Laurence's prose lacks is passion. He argues blandly that Nero's Golden House, the gargantuan palace he built after the fire of AD 64 destroyed much of the city, was an architectural innovation that enabled Nero to present himself to the Roman citizenry in a domestic setting: "Here, the emperor could entertain his people in person and display for them the spectacle of empire." Suetonius, whose "The Twelve Caesars" Laurence cites, describes the excesses of the Golden House in a far more entertaining style that alternates poses of calculated outrage with revelations of salacious tidbits. "When the palace had been decorated throughout . . . ," he concludes, "Nero dedicated it, and condescended to remark, 'Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being!' " Hardly the comment of a sovereign concerned with entertaining the masses.
'Roman Passions' by Ray Laurence
BOOK REVIEW
Forget toga parties and orgies: Our view of ancient Rome is exaggerated to an extreme, a new book suggests.
"Roman Passions" is weakest when Laurence discusses gladiator fights, executions and slaughter of wild animals that provided popular entertainment in Rome. He argues that these bloody spectacles arose from "a need to humiliate the enemy (slave, criminal or adversary)." But when he tries to relate them to the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the photographs of abused prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the execution of Saddam Hussein, his argument feels both strained and superficial -- despite 70 pages of footnotes, timelines, glossaries and sources.
The reader looks in vain here for the profundity of Marguerite Yourcenar, who saw the unimpressive biographies of the later emperors collected in "Writers of the Lives of the Caesars" as a prescient depiction of later 20th century politics. Yourcenar might have been writing the epitaph for the George W. Bush administration when she described a moribund culture as characterized by "that gigantism which is merely a morbid mimetism of growth, that waste which makes a pretense of wealth in states already bankrupt . . . those pompous reaffirmations of a great past amid present mediocrity and immediate disorder, those reforms which are merely palliatives. . . . "
